well done obama well done way to move america forward in this time of need despite the fact the council met amusing four times and to your existence i guess i'd rather have seen a commitment to the other news in the white house was actually working on the economy instead of a blatant surrender if you're with me let's break the said. looking for a. membership i mean like. you may remember that earlier this month i highlighted a man who's been under siege by the u.s. government for blowing the whistle on torture referring to former cia analyst and senior investigator for the senate foreign relations committee john kiriakou and while he isn't the only whistleblower charged out of this administration his stories particularly unique is that he actually left his position at the cia in two thousand and four three years later when waterboarding was becoming a point of contention he was put to the media circuit as

a commentator eventually to disclose the name of the covert cia officer to a freelance reporter simply wanted to help the journalist find a good source a little do you know that's the formation would cost him his career just last week he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison as part of a plea deal and he now stands as the first cia officer to be convicted under the espionage act an extremely archaic piece of world war one legislation now because of the legal proceedings caracal has been silent and unable to speak to the media not even more in fact he's here right now to talk to me about his personal case torture and the crusade against whistleblowers in this country john thank you so much for coming so much for having me so john you're the first cia official to go to jail and not for torturing people simply for exposing torture i mean how does it feel for your life to be sacrificed to be made an example of by the same government that you dedicated your life to i've come. you realize that this case is so much

bigger than than i am. for myself i feel bad that i'm going to prison it makes me sad i'm going to miss my family it's going to be tough on them but it's so much more important for issues of free speech and freedom of association it's so much more important for freedom of the press and i just hope that there's enough outrage out there once i go to prison that that helps someone in the future to stand up to the justice department to stand up to these infringements on our civil liberties i do to you know i know you divulge the name but i mean i can't help but think if you had been in the media supporting waterboarding would this be happening and i've always thought that if i had actually tortured someone i would be free today. we have a ball i mean. do you think that the real people who oversaw codified torture john you alberto gonzales and donald rumsfeld shouldn't they be the ones sitting in

prison john think they should be the ones in there others even if you just put aside the people who actually did the day to day torture what about the people who conceived of the policy and who implemented the policy where the attorneys that papered over it with with crazed legal analysis or the man who who destroyed evidence of the torture in the tapes he's enjoying a book tour right now and is going around washington giving speeches on how great torture is none of them are in prison and none of them will ever be prosecuted for the crimes that they've committed it's truly astounding i mean you're representing the two tiered justice system on the wrong side really showing the lawlessness the other impunity that the real torture is workmans have are there gallivanting around the world selling books talking about their careers something that's particularly disturbing is that the prosecution along with multiple other people have said that your punishments not harsh enough right. i mean is that surprised you that people

are actually saying that you deserve more jail time yes in in october two thousand and twelve when i accepted the plea to violating the intelligence identities protection act the judge called thirty months fair and appropriate just a couple of months later on friday she said that it was quote way too late unquote and that if she had not had her hands tied by this plea deal that she would have given me ten years i don't know what changed between october and january other than the fact that the courtroom in january was full of reporters and she may have wanted to appear tough in front of these reporters but in national security cases the prosecutors are allowed to have an ex parte communication with the judge that's a communication to which the defense and the defense attorneys are not privy they had such a communication just before i was formally sentenced and the prosecutors also gave the judge the so called victim impact statement i have no idea what was in that

impact statement because i wasn't permitted to see it but whatever it was and whatever the prosecutors told the judge they somehow convinced her to go on the record as saying that i deserved ten years in prison where you had no mal intent i mean i don't understand i had no malintent not only did the author of the intelligence identities protection act volunteer to serve as an expert witness for my defense but previous judicial rulings indicating that intent was the crux of the law that the government had to prove that i had the intent to harm the national security the judge dismissed those precedents and said i should have known better. let's go back to the beginning john i don't know if you can speak on this if you can it's ok but what was the trigger for you to even speak out in the first place did you see something that kind of moved you it all started for me in two thousand and two i had been the chief of count. terrorism operations for

the cia in pakistan i returned to headquarters early in the summer of two thousand and two and a senior officer approached me to ask if i was interested in being trained in so-called enhanced interrogation techniques torture techniques i told him that i had a moral problem with them i didn't want to be associated with the program and i moved on to a different job so in two thousand and seven or by two thousand and seven human rights watch and amnesty international and the red cross had reported that that there were credible reports that the cia was was torturing prisoners and president bush at the time said we don't torture we're not engaging in torture and if anyone is being tortured it's because of rogue cia officers well that just was simply not true so i want on a.b.c. news to talk about the capture of up was a beta the reporter asked me if i was a beta had been tortured i said he had and i said that it was torture and that it

was official u.s. government policy the very next day the cia filed what's called a crimes reported against me the justice department began investigating me and never stopped investigating me since december two thousand and seven in addition to that i've even been audited by the i.r.s. every single year since i gave that interview so just yeah i mean just the chilling effect kind of punishing you in any sense of the way it's a program of harassment absolutely absolutely and if course you know passing the buck to say it's just a few rogue cia officers it's just like. where they're just like a pig it's institutionalized i mean we know that it was from the top down. you know i just can't help but thinking. of torture you know when obama got elected he said he condemns torture really when you look at the evidence of dr borden in guantanamo bay the continued practice of rendition exploiting torture to different countries solitary confinement through indefinite detention i mean did torture really end with obama you know i. think it did and i'll tell you why it all depends on your

definition of torture the enhanced interrogation techniques included everything from from an officer grabbing a prisoner's lapels and giving him a shake up to waterboarding and sleep deprivation and cold cell with ice water being thrown on you or putting you into in a dog cage and keep you there for days at a time it depends on what the what the definition of torture is. my guess is that coercive techniques have not ended i think i think because the president formally banned torture there's an effort at least an effort to keep to the u.s. army field manual but i don't think we know that for a fact yeah absolutely i can't help but think about yesterday being the fortieth anniversary of watergate. you know the supreme court ruled nixon was not above the law we were hailing whistleblowers as really bringing down the prez of the united states yes for his utter lawlessness we've strayed so far john i mean how did we

get from where we are prosecuting the criminal to now prosecuting the messenger isn't it sad how we've had this incremental loss in our civil liberties all these years accelerated of course after nine eleven and there's been no public outrage ten years ago i think americans would have been flabbergasted to know that n.s.a. was intercepting their telephone calls and their e-mails without a warrant and now nobody seems to really care i think people would have been a gassed ten years ago if we were vaporizing teenage american citizens with predator drones american citizens who have never been accused of a crime who have never had a day in court who have never had the benefit of. judicial the judicial process just firing drone missiles at them and killing them instantly and there is no outrage in the streets i just don't understand how. americans have accepted this

loss of civil liberties without a fight it's very disappointing i don't either john and i ask that every day why don't people care and of course even the extrajudicial assassinations with and classifying why who we're targeting and why we're targeting them i mean all of that's classified and these things class and some everything's a matter of national security i mean and then we just cited shut down the office that was we're going to close guantanamo i mean you know days after obama gets elected the first he does that symbolic gesture where he's signing to close it and then days after he gets reelected closes the office and then what does this say something as an aside to it's actually a crime in the united states to overclassify and no one has ever ever been charged with committing that crime and we have about a minute left but i mean you hear about so many acts government officials say officials going on book tours talking about their experiences i mean what chilling effect is this really sending to people like you from speaking out i think the message is if you want to write a book saying how great the cia is and how great government policy is then they're

going to help you get that book out the publications review board at the cia is going to clear quickly and you're welcome to go on your book tour but if you criticize if you blow the whistle if you point out incidents of waste fraud abuse and the illegality be prepared for a tough road because you can expect the loss of your friends the loss of your job stability in my case the loss of my pension the loss of my house your life is going to change dramatically and we all really should be speaking up john muir the latest on a long war against whistleblowers and if we don't stop this now who knows where we're going to go with it thank you so much for taking her at her and she appreciate it john kiriakou former cia analyst and whistleblower thank you. feel i can see you so far go to our you tube channel youtube dot com slash breaking news that's it's got to figure out on hulu as well hulu dot com breaking the set and like our facebook page at facebook dot com. breaking the setting of your one about what i'm doing on

twitter verse follow me on twitter abby martin if you can break my preaching for now let's say to hear about the great pacific garbage trash patch next. wealthy british style. market why not. come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report. download

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talk some trash otherwise known as the number one product made it right here in america the us produces an absolutely out rageous and out of trash so much so that it's nearly impossible to imagine corn in the e.p.a. on average each one of us will produce four and a half pounds of solid waste today between the three hundred fourteen million of us living in this country by the end of the day will have collectively thrown away around one point four billion pounds of garbage granted much of the ways in the form of paper products and food both of which in time are broken down as organic material but plastic stuff never goes away is the plastic has been around for about one hundred forty five years with the exception of a small percentage that has been incinerated every piece of plastic ever made still exists somewhere in the world so it's all still exists where is it well waste

management here in the us works in a number of ways trash is either taken a dump or landfills but some of that garbage is missed we end up polluting our rivers and beaches with it ironically enough the biggest landfill in the world is not even on land it's in the middle of the ocean called the great pacific garbage patch the name refers to swirling masses of floating garbage and debris in the middle the pacific ocean it all together or at least the reed times the size of texas and can clearly be seen from outer space about eighty percent of the trash in the patch comes from land the other twenty percent comes from cruise ships other types of ships and oil rigs and the most common piece of garbage you'll find in it are plastic bags now i'm not trying to say that the us is the only country contributing to the giant floating island of crap no this is very much an international problem it is important note however that americans throw away an estimate. a hundred billion plastic bags every single year and we recycle less than

one percent of them can't stress this enough plastic does not ever decompose plastic debris on the ocean surface is broken down by sunlight which thickens the water and creates a sort of soup made of suspended plastic particles which are inherently toxic plankton an organic material and that growing on these bits of plastic are eaten by fish which are then in turn eaten by birds and people the toxic plastics soup then becomes part of the ecosystem in a way that can do nothing but harm and it will still be years before we fully understand the effects this floating dump has on the environment and humanity now i hate to be cynical but i'm not going to sit here and tell you that we can all band together and clean this mess up world leaders of already all agreed with the assessment made by captain charles moore the man who discovered the great pacific garbage patch you said that clip effort would quote bankrupt any country and kill

wildlife in the nets as it went. it's safe to say that there is no solution for a few simple cleanup here even if every person on the planet stopped throwing away plastic bags to day and we began to recycle as much as we could these plastics in the ocean wouldn't disappear they're there to say what's worse is that we're no longer talking about a single patch of garbage every ocean in the world now has a garbage patch that's growing bigger every year and they're all interconnected with a perfect metaphor for humanity's destruction but i'm not saying that we should give up just because we can't go back doesn't mean that we can't move forward and start approaching our consumption differently look no one can speak for the poor critters of the ocean but we can still speak for ourselves right now in fact the future of humanity depends on it. there have been. numerous times in this nation's history where certain civil

liberties have been repealed however every time this is happen it's been temporary in times of war or strife and the rights have always been reinstated to the public take for example an eight hundred sixty one when lincoln temporarily suspended habeas corpus until the following year what about under this addition act of nine hundred seventeen where antiwar speech against world war one was criminalized only to be repealed three years later or many of you probably remember learning about executive order nine zero six six when f.d.r. authorized the internment of japanese american citizens for four horrifying years and lastly during the red scare the current is witch hunt against americans who are suspected to be communists lasted six years and all of these cases as an unconstitutional as they were there was a light at the end of the tunnel but first for today for the first time in american history the rights of citizens have been systematically roaded under

a blanket war against terror that has no clear goals enemy or and so what does this mean for the restoration of our civil liberties today to talk about just this i was joined earlier by independent journalist robbie martin of media roots dot org check it out so robbie oh is this war different than all these other periods in history that i just want to over. well it's different in the fact that duration which you went over quite well in your intro but also it's different because all this was brought into fruition from nine eleven which is now over a decade old and we haven't had any sort of ongoing threat or crisis that would legitimize these continuing civil liberty curtailments so it's different in the sense that you know the things you mention like the civil war and world war two in the. carthy i mean each one of those actually had

a cohesive you know you could argue about the reasoning for the for the civil liberties erosions that happened during those events you know that's a whole different argument but they were all real things the civil war was a it was a crisis in american crisis world war two. was an actual military you know operation we interned the japanese because we thought that they were spies which is absurd but that's that was the reason. so it's it's very different in the sense that this is almost turned into background noise where there's actually not anything happening or legitimizing these continuing erosions right and they want they keep happening robbie i mean and as you just said there's nothing to legitimize that i mean the threat of terrorism is virtually nonexistent this country are more and likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than you are of a terrorist attack and i wanted to play this clip from glenn greenwald on the sam seeder show talking about the patriot act. the patriot act is just something that

never gets discussed anymore it's not considered controversial bill it's just blended in to our political culture it's just something we now take for granted in this to me shows how what is at one time a radical act and viewed as extremism ultimately becomes just normalized by blasting on the mouth and then just sort of blending into the woodwork. i love what he says there because it's so true i mean in the patriot act we're just one in a long list of systematic erosion of our civil liberties that isn't talked about at all it's just reinstated every time there's absolutely no point of contention when at the time it was actually extremely controversial so much dissent against it and now it's just voted in. i don't know i mean when you think about it. well the patriot act is is one i would say one of three things that we do we did after nine eleven and you know supposedly in response to it. and the you

know the the provisions in it which which basically makes sneak and peek searches legal for any suspected terrorist or whatever. you know which essentially means the government could come into your house search your entire house your computer take all your data and never tell you and never have to bring it up in a court of law if they actually do prosecute you. i think that it's it's it's really it's disturbing and unsettling how much it's gone into the background that the patriot act has already been in existence for ten years it was signed again by obama. where he added on an extension to it so. i mean as far as i can see there's no chance that it will actually be repealed any time soon and it's already gone on for over ten years right and let's let's talk a little bit what this is doing to people especially like you said i mean the sneak and peek searches the patriot act opening this and this massive surveillance great

allowing for warrantless wiretapping how does the surveillance the grid and all of these new technologies play a role into the stifling of the send the chilling effect in this culture of fear in a post nine eleven world. well you know if it wasn't irreversible enough by the duration and sort of the non of bent that this was done in this response to. it makes it even more irreversible because technology has become so danced in the last decade. you know nine eleven happened around the same time that the internet was breaking through to the mainstream so the internet g.p.s. tracking being affordable you know you can get a g.p.s. tracker for twenty five forty bucks now. and you know i mean imagine what law enforcement and government have so much power now to spy on everybody and database communications from every everything. that it makes it it makes it

more permanent and that's a really really good point right there is that it's almost impossible to go back i mean look at the even the surveillance apparatus has now crossed over with the corporate corporatocracy i mean the military industrial complex all of these corporations and military corporations that are profiting off this technology off of these rosen's of her rights the surveillance let's talk about habeas corpus though because i think a lot of instances in the past when corpus was repealed temporarily i mean it was a huge deal temporarily it was repealed and then reinstated now i mean we look back at the internment of japanese citizens it's almost an beristain and it's it is embarrassing i mean it's horrifying that we do. and now you know you have the n.b.a. past reinstated even after this lawsuit massive protests i mean why is this accepted . well it's accepted for basically that what we're talking about now is the reason it could accept it everybody has been conditioned to accept this sort of background

noise of privacy you know elimination what the patriot act. get mo has existed for over ten years so you can make you draw a comparison to that to the interim and camps in the internment camps were only around for four years it took thirty five years for the u.s. government to acknowledge the kind of the you know the violation that was jimmy carter paid out two hundred thousand dollars to all the survive mean people the japanese who were interned. chart even ten years of get no we're still accusing them of being dangerous terrorists but yet where there's never been you know there's been very few trials of any of these people are there indefinitely so. i don't i don't see us looking back on this with the same level berrisford because it's become normalized it's not like those other events in history where

they were done in response to a major crisis that was ongoing there's not on your right nine eleven happened on one single day right here i mean we've given the government a complete blank check and a post out of the world it's absolutely unacceptable and we need to demand our rights back before it's too late thank you so much for coming on giving us your take robbie martin of media org for having me abbi. how we explain this world to our children a world without privacy one that speaking out against the government can get you thrown in jail and definitely one where dissent is now terrorism and continue to be assassinated by this government you know we look back at mccarthyism in the japanese internment as lessons to learn about past government transgressions how long will take back to look at this government mistakes and this generation's mistakes because the longer we wait the more we'll lose.

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